The Economic Illiterati
Foreign Policy has a fantastic piece on French and German attitudes regarding capitalism and entrepreneurship. Notable tidbits of stupidity include:
“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues. Because the 21st century begins with “an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth],” any future prosperity “depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.” Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.” This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.
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Start-ups, Histoire du XXe siècle tells its students, are “audacious enterprises” with “ill-defined prospects.” Then it links entrepreneurs with the tech bubble, the Nasdaq crash, and mass layoffs across the economy. (Think “creative destruction” without the “creative.”) In one widely used text, a section on technology and innovation does not mention a single entrepreneur or company. Instead, students read a lengthy treatise on whether technological progress destroys jobs.
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One might expect Europeans to view the world through a slightly left-of-center, social-democratic lens. The surprise is the intensity and depth of the anti-market bias being taught in Europe’s schools. Students learn that private companies destroy jobs while government policy creates them. Employers exploit while the state protects. Free markets offer chaos while government regulation brings order. Globalization is destructive, if not catastrophic. Business is a zero-sum game, the source of a litany of modern social problems. Some enterprising teachers and parents may try to teach an alternative view, and some books are less ideological than others. But given the biases inherent in the curricula, this background is unavoidable. It is the context within which most students develop intellectually. And it’s a belief system that must eventually appear to be the truth.
This bias has tremendous implications that reach far beyond the domestic political debate in these two countries. These beliefs inform students’ choices in life. Taught that the free market is a dangerous wilderness, twice as many Germans as Americans tell pollsters that you should not start a business if you think it might fail. According to the European Union’s internal polling, just two in five Germans and French would like to be their own boss, compared to three in five Americans. Whereas 8 percent of Americans say they are currently involved in starting a business, that’s true of only 2 percent of Germans and 1 percent of the French. Another 28 percent of Americans are considering starting a business, compared to just 11 percent of the French and 18 percent of Germans. The loss to Europe’s two largest economies in terms of jobs, innovation, and economic dynamism is severe.
How long has the painfully economically clueless and Lefty anti-globalization poster child Naomi Klein been writing French and German economic textbooks now? Fuck me sideways and call me Zsuzsa.
On a Hungarian note, I am of the opinion that many Hungarians are, much like the Chinese, instinctually entrepreneurial by nature (e.g. Andy Grove and Charles Simonyi). By entrepreneurial, I don’t mean prone to thievery. One extraordinarily and blindingly simple way to unleash the inherent entrepreneurial talent of the Hungarians would be be to slash corporate and personal income tax rates.
Last douchebaggy musing of mine, I wonder how much of risk taking and entrepreneurship is genetic? After all, it is said (and I believe it), entrepreneurs are born, not made. If this is the case, then Europe doesn’t look good in the long term. Why?
1) One could argue that many of genetically entrepreneurial (I am just positing this, who knows if this is true at all) have already left Europe for the States.
2) There is a certain self-selection that comes with immigration. Essentially, Europe is getting the immigrants that want to live off the dole, while the States are getting those that want to bust their humps and make their childrens’ lives better.
Stupid French. Stupid Germans. Stupid Hungarians.
